Electric Car Racing Is Great—And Not Because It's Green

The first thing you need to know is that the pit stop isn't a pit stop. Forget the tire change and the fuel top-off you've seen at Indy or Daytona. When a Formula E racecar enters the pits, the driver pulls into the garage, leaps out, and gets strapped into a second car with a fully charged battery, all over the course of about 45 seconds.

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It's one way to beat range anxiety.

Formula E, the electric little brother of Formula 1, is in the midst of its third season. This weekend it came to Brooklyn for the New York City ePrix, the league's debut in Gotham and one of the first authorized car races within New York City in ages. Watching open-wheel EVs dive-bomb around an old industrial pier, one thing becomes clear. This is not a finished product. But it's fun.

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Future Mobility Goes Smash

The official line on Formula E is all about the vegetables, not the junk food. Electric racing is a glimpse into the future, they say. A way to watch cars go zoom—and, with any luck, smash into each other—without the guilt of thinking about how much fossil fuel they're burning. In a further attempt to reduce waste, each car gets 8 and only 8 of Michelin's 18-inch Formula E tires for the entire racing weekend, and has to run them whether it's hot or cold, dry or wet.

With the series cranking up the voltage in its third season, it's attracting bigger-name sponsors and advertisers. They are not the Budweiser and Sunoco of NASCAR, though, but Qualcomm and Panasonic—companies that like to use phrases like "innovation leader" and "future mobility." Richard Branson's Virgin sponsors the car that won Saturday's race.

Those are the big green talking points. What actually makes Formula E curious to watch is that the startup sport is just a little scrappy and strange.

Some of these stem from the peculiarities of electric power. What trips up anyone right away is the noise, the high-pitched appliance whine of 20 electric cars zipping by, especially compared to the back-of-the-neck baritone that is an internal combustion chorus. The kooky pit stop, too. The cars are allowed a max output of 200 kilowatts, which can take them to speeds of around 140 mph on an open straight. But there's no mid-race supercharger waiting on pit row. All you can do is use all the energy in car #1, swap to car #2, and hope you've managed your energy cleverly enough to get across the line before the juice dries up.

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The cars themselves are rolling experiments. On the track, just as they are on the road, electric cars are a work in progress. You can visit team garages but you can't take photos of the way those teams rig up their battery and motor setups, a trade secret.

Perhaps someday soon a battery breakthrough will make it easier to take road trips in a Tesla, and will allow e-racing to more like its petroleum-fueled counterpart. Until then, however, Formula E is in an odd space. It's simultaneously a more professional, moneyed version of a collegiate solar-powered car competition and a less polished version of Formula 1, with its chic and celebrities. They gave out champagne in an industrial maritime terminal, which feels right.

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Can They Really Reinvent Car Racing?

Every new sporting league has the same problem. Nostalgia and narrative keep people coming back to the big American sports—all those times you've died and been reborn with your favorite teams, the way you promise to bleed Dodger blue or Celtic green until death. No matter how exciting the product on the field, or court, or track, new leagues don't have the brand recognition established leagues rely on.

In the case of Formula E, sure, there are now big carmakers signed on like Audi and Jaguar, and far-out EV company Faraday Future has a team. But F-E doesn't have decades of glorious history. It doesn't have the very best racing drivers on the planet. And a not insignificant chunk of the built-in theoretical audience—racing fans—are predisposed to hate a bunch of electric cars whizzing around the track and everything they stand for.

So, as Tim Mayer of the FIA told PM down in the paddock, Formula E has to position itself as equal parts tomorrow's transportation demo and fun day out. After a hot July afternoon in Brooklyn, I can tell you that part is a success. The Brooklyn pier course, set off by crude concrete barricades and metal gates, put the racecars through hairpin turns and tight follow-throughs that saw them trading paint to ooh and aahs. There's a feeling that's a little more minor league, a little more DIY than you could get from a more established, elegant form of racing. And whether or not you care about electric cars, it's tense to glance at the scoreboard that displays the percentage of each car's battery power remaining and wonder how they're going to make it.

Any great sport is defined by the limitations set forth by its rulebook. In 2017, Formula E is a spectacle bounded on all sides by the realities of the present, by the fact that it's a demonstration of a technology that still has a lot of growing up to do. But off in the distance lies possibilities that could change the way motorsport works. Imagine cars that charge wirelessly as they fly around the track, Mayer says, allowing electric cars to stage their own 24-hour endurance race.

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